He's also shockingly good at convincing developers to create polished products in new ways. The idea of an all-in-one was foreign before the the iMac, using a 1.5" drive in the iPod was seen as suicidal, and none of the labels would sign for digital music distribution before iTunes. Dropping floppies, integrating burners as standard, those little wireless network access / speaker express thingies... Jobs has a way of seeing things ahead of other people, and pushing until it happens.
Sure, he's a good salesman. But the best thing he can sell is a strange idea to a team of developers and financers, and make it actually come out in polished format.
Chrome got a lot of buzz and people talking this year. It also has a pretty solid / minimalistic interface UI, and brings forth some interesting ideas in browsing (generated start pages and dynamic searching comes to mind). Also, while Google has always been supportive of Mozilla, them putting their weight behind a browser *could* become quite significant.
Also, my understanding is that Chromium is Chrome with the logo / branding stripped out for trademark reasons, similar to Netscape / Mozilla in the early days. To say that they're separate at the moment is like arguing Linux vs Gnu/Linux. One's technically righter than the other, but they still both work.
And yes, Wine hitting 1.0 needs to be on that list.
Actually, Apple does this on a pretty routine basis. My girlfriend's powerbook is PowerPC based, so Snow Leopard won't run on it. My even older powerbook was 603e based, and couldn't run OSX. My desktop was 680x0 based, and couldn't run OS9.
Apple has transitioned many times throughout their history, each time adding a virtualization layer so that older applications could continue to run on new hardware. This didn't help older hardware run the new OS, but that has been seen as an acceptable compromise.
It seems like this would be fine, if there were an open market. But to lock user's phones into a particular network, lock users into multi-year contracts, then downwardly adjust service, seems a little dodgy.
I don't doubt that shifting spectrum to 3G is the right way to go... I'm just not convinced that now is the time and this is the way.
The moment you move or re-organize an application on windows or linux, everything breaks.
You can pick up applications on the macintosh and arbitrarily re-organize them, and everything continues to work. This includes local and remote shortcuts.
On windows, you have to interact with the start menu On the Mac, the disk is still a viable interface.
I'm not just talking about the underlying technology that puts bits on a disk (where Linux is far ahead), but the way the user interacts with those bits.
On Mac OS7 - OSX (from 1992+) to access a program you go to wherever you put it, and click the obvious icon.
On Windows, to access a program you go to the program folder, open the folder with the program or parent company's name, and wade through hundreds of random art and other resources to click what you hope is the right executable.
On Linux, it's probably buried somewhere in Bin with every other application ever created. Give up, go to the application's man page, figure out the command line command to get it to work, create a shortcut for that command, and avoid the file system as much as possible. If your application saves something, pray that it saves to your home directory.
In terms of game development, commercial tools are still far better than OSS ones (sadly). 3DS Max and Maya, while still junk, are light years better than Blender. Gimp is not as usable or fully featured as Photoshop, especially for toolchains that can directly utilize PSD files. And at 50 dollars an hour or so, there is a huge incentive to get retail developers better tools.
On that last point, the PC community enjoys a thriving modding scene, where great games *are* developed utilizing some of these tools in a community-driven rules free environment. Commercial projects are created in such a way that new scripts or entire new engine modules can be compiled into the game and run, opening up the software *almost* entirely. You're not competing with a straight retail market, but a hybrid one.
The article's proposition of pushing a Linux gaming machine is a bit absurd, and is the sort of thing that companies waste money on all the time not realizing just how insanely difficult it is. To name just a few failed ones: Apple Bandai, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Panasonic 3DO, Philips CDI, Milton Bradley Vectrex, Sega Master System / CD / 32x / Saturn / Dreamcast, Atari 7600 / Lynx / Jaguar, Neo Geo CD / Pocket, Pioneer Laseractive, Amiga CD 32, Casio Loopy, Tiger Game.com / Gizmondon, Nokia N-Gage, VM Labs Nuon, Tapwave Zodiac, Bandai's WonderSwan / SwanCrystal, and a host of edutainment consoles all on clearance at Marshalls. Heck, the idea of a dedicated linux gaming machine was tested by Indrema's L600, which was never released due to intense competitive pressure from the other consoles on the market. The GP2x game system runs on embedded Linux, as does OpenPandora, and occupies a tiny niche segment. Sony has been great about releasing Linux on their consoles, none of which have really gone places. If you want to break into the market, commit yourself to two generations of systems and a minimum expenditure of 800 million dollars (2x 100 ml development, 100 ml marketing, 100 ml manufacturing / distribution setup, 100 ml eating costs on the first units sold / other issues).
If you want to capture desktop market share: fix the glaringly obvious usability problems with Gnome/GnuLinux, pour some effort into a sane file system with only necessary components exposed to users, and remove technical aspects wherever they user doesn't need to see them (like -rwxr-xr-x file permissions). These are not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but at least your development dollars are going at the primary problems with the Linux desktop, rather than propping up Loki as a savior.
Linux is a world-class platform for servers, a halfway descent desktop, and a kind of crappy gaming machine. Pushing it as a proper gaming machine is an incredibly expensive way to not play to it's strengths, and wine compatibility (which the article does not focus on) can never surpass the target platform.
As a game developer, I'm kind of annoyed how trivializing this is to the development process. A great game can take a team of 200 people 3-5 years to make. Most games are between 3 - 30 million dollars to make, and 80% of them don't make money. That means you need to spend between 15 and 150 million dollars to finally get a game that catches on.
Personally, I feel that Linux's file system is even more of a sewer as the Windows file system, and until it takes a major jump up... perhaps it doesn't deserve to be everyone's desktop.
That having been said, an OSS or Creative Commons license texture, object, skeleton, animation, sound, etc repository might be helpful, especially if standardized around specific file formats. There would need to be some recommendation system to tell people which resources can go with what, as some OSS games take the "melting pot" theory of art (which just looks terrible).
Also, we should look to the sorts of evolutionary development that OSS games can do, but retail cannot. Which is to say, focus on making your engine and code as modifiable as possible, release a minimal chunk that shows the greatness, and shephard your players to help build. That's the theory, of course. While most OSS software is actually build by one or two people, MUDS have shown that if you put gamers explicitly into the role of creators you can get amazing community-built experiences.
Keep it scripable, keep it modular, explicitly let anyone play and build, and maybe something will come out that will make the windows users jealous.
Having been in mixed Dvorak, Qwerty, and Abcdefg environments, and having been on a quest for the ultimate keyboard for the past 10 years, I'm pretty confident that Qwerty is *good enough* until something truly different comes along.
Dvorak *can* run a little faster than Qwerty for typing, but not so much that you'd see an appreciably speed increase for nomal use. And as Dvorak has been around for about 80 years now, I don't think anyone is getting in on the wave of the future by using it. Similarly, you'd be surprised how hard it is to use an alphabetized keyboard after years of Qwerty or Dvorak usage. The brain just doesn't change over that easily.
Unless an alternative layout increased speeds 100% or so, I'd keep things accessible. Just use Qwerty, and move on.
Some hard numbers can be found here. I have no insight as to how accurate they are.
Worldwide Console Sales
Wii: 43.80M 49.2% Xbox 360: 26.49M 29.7% PS3: 18.82M 21.1%
Worldwide Handheld Sales
DS: 94.66M 69.1% PSP: 42.30M 30.9%
Overall, the PS3 has a nearly 20 million installed userbase. By their worldwide weekly sales figures, the PS3 is only lagging behind the 360 by about 30%. That doesn't sound so doomy and gloomy.
Removing underutilized features is a pretty common way of reducing costs in consoles. Card slots were there to use the PS3 like a photo display device, but that happens infrequently enough and there are better alternatives to getting photos on the machine. Hardware compatibility is a big loss, but the fact is you can still get PS2's pretty cheap, and those will play PS1 games (unlike the PS3). On the opposite side, Sony's online infrastructure is light years more robust than when the PS3 started, and vibration has been added back into the controllers.
Overall I'd say that the PS3 is a lot better value than when it launched. No longer a $599 local console, the PS3 offers a real online service, good games, etc.
Why do people associate cutting underused features with "degrading?" They made the system leaner, meaner, and more affordable, all of which it really needed. Good job Sony!
It used to be that PC gaming and console gaming were running neck-and-neck for software sales. Now you're lucky if your PC port makes 20% of the console sales.
Similarly, there was a period there where optimizing your pc gaming rig seemed like a mainstream pasttime. Now, with laptops, lower-entry games dominate what is left.
The PC gaming industry as we knew it has completely changed. Is it dead? No, but it has become something completely different.
Riding the MBTA today, I saw three people simply walk through the badly-blaring doorstyles. This is pretty average of a day. I'd guess hackers make up less than 5% of the total farejumping.
Actually, Apple dropped the surcharge a while back. They're now all 99c one way or the other. Similarly, non-plus files are no longer available for plus-version songs.
What you're looking for is iTunes Plus. Bog standard AAC files in high bitrate, for the same cost as DRM-encumbered files.
If you really want to show that you care about a lack of DRM, skew the sales numbers so that non-DRM files are obviously outselling the encumbered ones.
When you have articles like this one floating around, vista takes a perception hit. The kinds of hardcore PC gamers who form the financial base of this hobby (and spend an extra 200 dollars for a few extra FPS) would look at the 20% speed penalty and freak out. We're talking about the kind of people who would plunk down an extra 100 dollars for a mouse with 2,000 DPI in order to gain a slight edge. Any performance numbers that put XP above Vista makes it the gaming rig of choice.
DX 10 as Vista only is basically useless, as most games are designed with DX 9 in mind (Thanks, nameless marketing droid!). If I'm not mistake, I believe that Vista 32-bit's support for more than 3 GB of RAM is a trick of reporting, in that it is showing what's installed and not what's accessible.
The question isn't "Is Vista good enough for games?" It's fine. The question is "Is Vista better for games than XP?" Perhaps this is changing, but the answer for a long time has been a simple "no." That no kills a lot of enthusiasm for PC gaming, which is reflected in sales.
Wolfgang Petersen is reportedly preparing to make "Das Reboot", a (very) short sequel.
Yes, but it feels like it takes forever. Just when you think the sequel has finally started rolling, the movie freeze frames for another five minutes. And the ending credits just keep going on and on and on and you just want to unplug the damned projector.
Uh, if you have a compulsive need to run games at maximum settings, maybe. I get by just fine on hardware that isn't bleeding-edge, you can too.
My laptop was 2k dollars 3 years ago. It barely runs Team Fortress 2 at all.
laptop popularity
Huh? What exactly does this have to do with gaming, especially considering desktops still far outnumber laptops?
Laptops outsell desktops, and are generally incapable of proper gaming. See my exmple above. The gaming companies seem to be targeting future theoretical desktops with amazing graphics cards, but lots of people are buying laptops which simply can't run most games at a descent framerate, and upgrading the video card is not an option.
and Vista.
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and throw down the BS flag here. Your intentions may be good, but you are at the least woefully misinformed. I game on Vista, and it's fine. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or has been lied to.
I game on Vista too. The problem isn't that games run 25% slower on Vista, the problem is the perception that games run slower on Vista. Why would you create an optimized gaming rig on anything other than XP? That perception just isn't good for pushing the future of gaming.
There seems to be a lot of sour grapes in these comments. The chinese did it first. It might be good, it might not. But they actually got something out the door under 100k dollars, which we have so far been unable to do.
All the rest is speculation. Hopefully it will be good, and the technology will trickle into the domestic automobile market. And if not, we will learn from the example. But either way, this is pushing technology forward for all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been at least 66 'Tycoon games since Railroad Tycoon 1 in 1998, averaging 3 and a half released per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_simulation_video_games#Business_simulation
He's also shockingly good at convincing developers to create polished products in new ways. The idea of an all-in-one was foreign before the the iMac, using a 1.5" drive in the iPod was seen as suicidal, and none of the labels would sign for digital music distribution before iTunes. Dropping floppies, integrating burners as standard, those little wireless network access / speaker express thingies... Jobs has a way of seeing things ahead of other people, and pushing until it happens.
Sure, he's a good salesman. But the best thing he can sell is a strange idea to a team of developers and financers, and make it actually come out in polished format.
Chrome got a lot of buzz and people talking this year. It also has a pretty solid / minimalistic interface UI, and brings forth some interesting ideas in browsing (generated start pages and dynamic searching comes to mind). Also, while Google has always been supportive of Mozilla, them putting their weight behind a browser *could* become quite significant.
Also, my understanding is that Chromium is Chrome with the logo / branding stripped out for trademark reasons, similar to Netscape / Mozilla in the early days. To say that they're separate at the moment is like arguing Linux vs Gnu/Linux. One's technically righter than the other, but they still both work.
And yes, Wine hitting 1.0 needs to be on that list.
Here in Cambridge, MA, I'm seeing 59.99 / 5GB for sprint and AT&T. T-mobile is offering 49.99 for unlimited.
Perhaps pricing variants are dependent upon the market, and some markets are more competitive than others?
Actually, Apple does this on a pretty routine basis. My girlfriend's powerbook is PowerPC based, so Snow Leopard won't run on it. My even older powerbook was 603e based, and couldn't run OSX. My desktop was 680x0 based, and couldn't run OS9.
Apple has transitioned many times throughout their history, each time adding a virtualization layer so that older applications could continue to run on new hardware. This didn't help older hardware run the new OS, but that has been seen as an acceptable compromise.
It seems like this would be fine, if there were an open market. But to lock user's phones into a particular network, lock users into multi-year contracts, then downwardly adjust service, seems a little dodgy.
I don't doubt that shifting spectrum to 3G is the right way to go... I'm just not convinced that now is the time and this is the way.
The moment you move or re-organize an application on windows or linux, everything breaks.
You can pick up applications on the macintosh and arbitrarily re-organize them, and everything continues to work. This includes local and remote shortcuts.
On windows, you have to interact with the start menu On the Mac, the disk is still a viable interface.
I'm not just talking about the underlying technology that puts bits on a disk (where Linux is far ahead), but the way the user interacts with those bits.
On Mac OS7 - OSX (from 1992+) to access a program you go to wherever you put it, and click the obvious icon.
On Windows, to access a program you go to the program folder, open the folder with the program or parent company's name, and wade through hundreds of random art and other resources to click what you hope is the right executable.
On Linux, it's probably buried somewhere in Bin with every other application ever created. Give up, go to the application's man page, figure out the command line command to get it to work, create a shortcut for that command, and avoid the file system as much as possible. If your application saves something, pray that it saves to your home directory.
In terms of game development, commercial tools are still far better than OSS ones (sadly). 3DS Max and Maya, while still junk, are light years better than Blender. Gimp is not as usable or fully featured as Photoshop, especially for toolchains that can directly utilize PSD files. And at 50 dollars an hour or so, there is a huge incentive to get retail developers better tools.
On that last point, the PC community enjoys a thriving modding scene, where great games *are* developed utilizing some of these tools in a community-driven rules free environment. Commercial projects are created in such a way that new scripts or entire new engine modules can be compiled into the game and run, opening up the software *almost* entirely. You're not competing with a straight retail market, but a hybrid one.
The article's proposition of pushing a Linux gaming machine is a bit absurd, and is the sort of thing that companies waste money on all the time not realizing just how insanely difficult it is. To name just a few failed ones: Apple Bandai, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Panasonic 3DO, Philips CDI, Milton Bradley Vectrex, Sega Master System / CD / 32x / Saturn / Dreamcast, Atari 7600 / Lynx / Jaguar, Neo Geo CD / Pocket, Pioneer Laseractive, Amiga CD 32, Casio Loopy, Tiger Game.com / Gizmondon, Nokia N-Gage, VM Labs Nuon, Tapwave Zodiac, Bandai's WonderSwan / SwanCrystal, and a host of edutainment consoles all on clearance at Marshalls. Heck, the idea of a dedicated linux gaming machine was tested by Indrema's L600, which was never released due to intense competitive pressure from the other consoles on the market. The GP2x game system runs on embedded Linux, as does OpenPandora, and occupies a tiny niche segment. Sony has been great about releasing Linux on their consoles, none of which have really gone places. If you want to break into the market, commit yourself to two generations of systems and a minimum expenditure of 800 million dollars (2x 100 ml development, 100 ml marketing, 100 ml manufacturing / distribution setup, 100 ml eating costs on the first units sold / other issues).
If you want to capture desktop market share: fix the glaringly obvious usability problems with Gnome/GnuLinux, pour some effort into a sane file system with only necessary components exposed to users, and remove technical aspects wherever they user doesn't need to see them (like -rwxr-xr-x file permissions). These are not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but at least your development dollars are going at the primary problems with the Linux desktop, rather than propping up Loki as a savior.
Linux is a world-class platform for servers, a halfway descent desktop, and a kind of crappy gaming machine. Pushing it as a proper gaming machine is an incredibly expensive way to not play to it's strengths, and wine compatibility (which the article does not focus on) can never surpass the target platform.
As a game developer, I'm kind of annoyed how trivializing this is to the development process. A great game can take a team of 200 people 3-5 years to make. Most games are between 3 - 30 million dollars to make, and 80% of them don't make money. That means you need to spend between 15 and 150 million dollars to finally get a game that catches on.
It's not a trivially easy hook to sell systems.
Personally, I feel that Linux's file system is even more of a sewer as the Windows file system, and until it takes a major jump up... perhaps it doesn't deserve to be everyone's desktop.
That having been said, an OSS or Creative Commons license texture, object, skeleton, animation, sound, etc repository might be helpful, especially if standardized around specific file formats. There would need to be some recommendation system to tell people which resources can go with what, as some OSS games take the "melting pot" theory of art (which just looks terrible).
Also, we should look to the sorts of evolutionary development that OSS games can do, but retail cannot. Which is to say, focus on making your engine and code as modifiable as possible, release a minimal chunk that shows the greatness, and shephard your players to help build. That's the theory, of course. While most OSS software is actually build by one or two people, MUDS have shown that if you put gamers explicitly into the role of creators you can get amazing community-built experiences.
Keep it scripable, keep it modular, explicitly let anyone play and build, and maybe something will come out that will make the windows users jealous.
According to Nielsons, The average US household is watching 8 hours of TV a day.
Similarly, I believe Time Warner's trial caps are 40GB. The average American houseshold would hit that bandwidth cap in a week.
Having been in mixed Dvorak, Qwerty, and Abcdefg environments, and having been on a quest for the ultimate keyboard for the past 10 years, I'm pretty confident that Qwerty is *good enough* until something truly different comes along.
Dvorak *can* run a little faster than Qwerty for typing, but not so much that you'd see an appreciably speed increase for nomal use. And as Dvorak has been around for about 80 years now, I don't think anyone is getting in on the wave of the future by using it. Similarly, you'd be surprised how hard it is to use an alphabetized keyboard after years of Qwerty or Dvorak usage. The brain just doesn't change over that easily.
Unless an alternative layout increased speeds 100% or so, I'd keep things accessible. Just use Qwerty, and move on.
Some hard numbers can be found here. I have no insight as to how accurate they are.
Worldwide Console Sales
Wii: 43.80M 49.2%
Xbox 360: 26.49M 29.7%
PS3: 18.82M 21.1%
Worldwide Handheld Sales
DS: 94.66M 69.1%
PSP: 42.30M 30.9%
Overall, the PS3 has a nearly 20 million installed userbase. By their worldwide weekly sales figures, the PS3 is only lagging behind the 360 by about 30%. That doesn't sound so doomy and gloomy.
Removing underutilized features is a pretty common way of reducing costs in consoles. Card slots were there to use the PS3 like a photo display device, but that happens infrequently enough and there are better alternatives to getting photos on the machine. Hardware compatibility is a big loss, but the fact is you can still get PS2's pretty cheap, and those will play PS1 games (unlike the PS3). On the opposite side, Sony's online infrastructure is light years more robust than when the PS3 started, and vibration has been added back into the controllers.
Overall I'd say that the PS3 is a lot better value than when it launched. No longer a $599 local console, the PS3 offers a real online service, good games, etc.
Why do people associate cutting underused features with "degrading?" They made the system leaner, meaner, and more affordable, all of which it really needed. Good job Sony!
If you've seen blu-ray vs DVD sales, they still have to win out over DVD. Just because HD-DVD died first doesn't mean that Blu-Ray's future is secure.
It used to be that PC gaming and console gaming were running neck-and-neck for software sales. Now you're lucky if your PC port makes 20% of the console sales.
Similarly, there was a period there where optimizing your pc gaming rig seemed like a mainstream pasttime. Now, with laptops, lower-entry games dominate what is left.
The PC gaming industry as we knew it has completely changed. Is it dead? No, but it has become something completely different.
Riding the MBTA today, I saw three people simply walk through the badly-blaring doorstyles. This is pretty average of a day. I'd guess hackers make up less than 5% of the total farejumping.
Actually, Apple dropped the surcharge a while back. They're now all 99c one way or the other. Similarly, non-plus files are no longer available for plus-version songs.
What you're looking for is iTunes Plus. Bog standard AAC files in high bitrate, for the same cost as DRM-encumbered files.
If you really want to show that you care about a lack of DRM, skew the sales numbers so that non-DRM files are obviously outselling the encumbered ones.
When you have articles like this one floating around, vista takes a perception hit. The kinds of hardcore PC gamers who form the financial base of this hobby (and spend an extra 200 dollars for a few extra FPS) would look at the 20% speed penalty and freak out. We're talking about the kind of people who would plunk down an extra 100 dollars for a mouse with 2,000 DPI in order to gain a slight edge. Any performance numbers that put XP above Vista makes it the gaming rig of choice.
DX 10 as Vista only is basically useless, as most games are designed with DX 9 in mind (Thanks, nameless marketing droid!). If I'm not mistake, I believe that Vista 32-bit's support for more than 3 GB of RAM is a trick of reporting, in that it is showing what's installed and not what's accessible.
The question isn't "Is Vista good enough for games?" It's fine. The question is "Is Vista better for games than XP?" Perhaps this is changing, but the answer for a long time has been a simple "no." That no kills a lot of enthusiasm for PC gaming, which is reflected in sales.
Wolfgang Petersen is reportedly preparing to make "Das Reboot", a (very) short sequel.
Yes, but it feels like it takes forever. Just when you think the sequel has finally started rolling, the movie freeze frames for another five minutes. And the ending credits just keep going on and on and on and you just want to unplug the damned projector.
insane requirements and costs
Uh, if you have a compulsive need to run games at maximum settings, maybe. I get by just fine on hardware that isn't bleeding-edge, you can too.
My laptop was 2k dollars 3 years ago. It barely runs Team Fortress 2 at all.
laptop popularity
Huh? What exactly does this have to do with gaming, especially considering desktops still far outnumber laptops?
Laptops outsell desktops, and are generally incapable of proper gaming. See my exmple above. The gaming companies seem to be targeting future theoretical desktops with amazing graphics cards, but lots of people are buying laptops which simply can't run most games at a descent framerate, and upgrading the video card is not an option.
and Vista.
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and throw down the BS flag here. Your intentions may be good, but you are at the least woefully misinformed. I game on Vista, and it's fine. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or has been lied to.
I game on Vista too. The problem isn't that games run 25% slower on Vista, the problem is the perception that games run slower on Vista. Why would you create an optimized gaming rig on anything other than XP? That perception just isn't good for pushing the future of gaming.
While somewhat more trap-based than torture based, Tecmo's Deception mostly fits what you describe.
There seems to be a lot of sour grapes in these comments. The chinese did it first. It might be good, it might not. But they actually got something out the door under 100k dollars, which we have so far been unable to do.
All the rest is speculation. Hopefully it will be good, and the technology will trickle into the domestic automobile market. And if not, we will learn from the example. But either way, this is pushing technology forward for all of us.